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Tuesday, November 11, 2014

Determining IP address and hostname of end point device connected to a VMware Horizon View virtual desktop

A client with a VMware View infrastructure that services various offices around the world recently asked me if there was a way to determine what the hostname or IP address of the thin client his users’ were using to connect to the virtual desktops.  Having worked with Citrix and VMware’s desktop virtualization products over the past 2 years, I immediately remembered that Citrix’s Desktop Director provides such information but wasn’t sure whether VMware’s Administration console did and after browsing around, I realized it wasn’t there.  I went ahead and started searching on the web and only found forum posts that you would have to parse through the View Connection server(s) logs.  This wasn’t ideal because the logs aren’t easy to read as it is all text that extends far wider than even my retina Mac can keep on one line.

After putting this on hold while I worked on other priority item, I finally had the time to revisit this yesterday and knowing that I didn’t have any luck through the hour I used to research this before, I went ahead and posted on the VMware forums:

Determining the IP and Name of the end point device connected to a virtual desktop
https://communities.vmware.com/message/2447210#2447210

A fellow user immediately answered with the solution and that was to look in the following portion of the registry on the VMware View virtual desktop:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER –> Volatile Environment:

image

The keys we were interested in are the following:

  • ViewClient_IP_Address
  • ViewClient_Machine_Name

… but as shown in the screenshot above, there is so much more useful information such as the View Connection broker used (handy to troubleshoot load balanced environments), the logon server (troubleshoot domain controller issues), protocol type (what protocol the user is connected to the desktop with) and much more.

Seeing how I had issues finding this information, I hope this post would make it easier for anyone else looking for this information and may be searching with words I used that did not yield results.

2 comments:

Unknown said...

But how do we see the registry values for a remote machine ?

AZV said...

Any idea on how to see this in a env that is non persistent.

scenario: user is connected to a horizon VDI vm two days ago. The pool is non persistent and refreshes every time the user logs out. We get a request to see where the user connect from for a security audit.

Question: Does Horizon/View actually keep track of this information historically?